What would Roger Say? Williams, that is... the founder of the Rhode Island colony is one old measure of religious freedom and the menace of theocratic meddling in America.

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Tony Schwartz -- who made "the Daisy Spot," the most famous TV commercial in American politics -- built a career on the supremacy of sound, and the ear, in selling.

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How Barack Obama became the world's candidate for president of the US: by tuning the meaning of "American exceptionalism."

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Dan Ariely shows how often we don't know what we're choosing and don't get what we want -- because we are predictably irrational creatures.

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A great American novelist, Russell Banks, thinks out loud about the real historical and emotional context of the United States at decision point.

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Bob Marley and Barack Obama are the absent giants at Jamaica's Calabash festival of writers and readers -- Obama because he, too, seems a monument to imagination.

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Writers in Jamaica at the Calabash literary festival sound notes of lyricism, multiplicity and what feels like a second surge of post-imperial feeling.

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Alpha Males of the Caribbean: Derek Walcott goes to war with the only other West Indian winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, V. S. Naipaul.

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The Scottish world-traveler Ben Haggarty tells "open source" stories -- from as far back as the Stone Age. He says it's the human content, not the cultural variations, that hold our hearts.

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Black economist and polymath Glenn Loury says that the Reverend Jeremiah Wright's 15 minutes of fame are not over, and shouldn't be.

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Kevin Phillips foresees the collapse of the American Empire, "almost before it started," with high style and deep seriousness.

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Oscar-winner Errol Morris says his Abu Ghraib movie is built on "a graphic representation of American foreign policy, pure and simple."

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The neo-formalist poet Mary Jo Salter teaches and talks about the lessons of beauty, womanhood, artistic and family life

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The Israeli fiction writer (and now filmmaker) Etgar Keret unveils forbidden states of mind in his society: confusion, doubt, fear.

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David Amram learned his "many musics" from Dizzy Gillespie, Jack Kerouac and Bach. His spirit is neither "multicultural" nor eclectic, but "lovingly trying to learn the fundamentals... of beautiful things that touch your heart."

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Slavery in the American South ended only a generation or two ago, not with the Emancipation Proclamation -- in Douglas Blackmon's re-visioning of the race story in our country.

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Christopher Hill, talking North Korea out of its nuclear program, has also to talk the Bush Administration into a deal.

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Nicholson Baker, the meta-novelist, recounts his hyper-linked history, "Human Smoke," that judges World War 2 to be "the end of civilization."

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Patrick Cockburn's account of the Iraqi Army's flight from battle is that the US is trying to foment a civil war among the Shia majority that the Baghdad government cannot win.

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Brazil's statesman ex-president Cardoso says: think of today's crisis and opportunity as a "post-Napoleonic moment" between disaster and renewal.

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Pico Iyer draws on a 40-year friendship with the Dalai Lama in a meditation on globalism and the Tibet crisis in China's Olympic year.

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Artist Bill Flynn talks about the drawing project -- of an old parlor chair -- that became his personal battle (500 images over 5 years) with the war in Iraq

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Jay Rosen, the media critic at PressThink, listens for the death rattle of the newspaper industry.

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A short course in the transformation of media -- by bloggers of the world at Global Voices Online.

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Revolutions come and go, but something about Cuba's music is forever. With Ned Sublette

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Who Killed JFK? In David Kaiser's authoritative history, Oswald was the killer but it was a Cuba-centered conspiracy that set the stage.

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Cuba after Fidel will run, as it always has, on transnational family networks and an 'informal' economy, in the view of social historian Adrian Lopez Denis.

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Cuba on the edge of a Velvet Revolution? or a civil war? The Patrick Symmes version of the Castro Revolution and its aftermath now.

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Does the new "news" of Web communities have a credibility problem? Is it half as bad as the diseases afflicting "old media?"

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Eric Hobsbawm, the global historian, considers how the Iraq War has moved power in the world and changed the agenda of the 21st Century.

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